Toy Story 4 (2019) - Movie Review

I’ve been somewhat dreading this one. Not because I have any doubt about the latest iteration of the franchise that pointed the way forward for CGI-animated cinema, or that Disney/Pixar in its current postmodern phase isn’t capable of delivering. It’s more because, as I got into last year, Toy Story 3 is a very important film for me. It’s the film that served as a paradigm shift in how I viewed media meant for children from that point on, making me realise that the age-old excuse of ‘it’s just for kids’ is nothing more than the catchcry of lazy filmmakers.

In order for this film to measure up to that, it would have to pull an artistic feat that I doubt even Disney/Pixar is capable of. There’s no way this could be yet another improvement on the franchise’s kid-friendly existentialism; all it could do is be another good addition, in my eyes at least, and that’s thankfully what we get here.

The improved texture quality that Pixar has been trotting out over the last few years stays strong here, showing just how far the technology has come over the last 24 years. Whether it’s porcelain, plastic, water, grass or nightmare fuel, it all looks great and the lighting effects make for some serious eye candy. Same goes for the returning voice cast, from Tom Hanks as everyone’s favourite religious zealot by proxy Woody to a very welcome return by Annie Potts as a rather Indiana Jones-esque Bo Peep.

As for the new faces (or voices, rather), we got quite a few to go through here. Tony Hale as Forky, the homemade toy that Disney is already charging premium prices for the privilege of taking home (one of the most dissonant bits of marketing this franchise has ever generated, by the by), does well with the potent mixture of confusion and under-the-surface terror at his own existence in the story. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as a pair of carnival attraction prizes maintain their pedigree for double-team banter, making for some of the better one-liners in both writing and delivery.

Christina Hendricks as Gabby Gabby, who sort-of amounts to the main villain here (more on that ambiguity in a bit), handles what should be a very fiddly character quite nicely. And then there’s the Internet’s current obsession Keanu Reeves as the daredevil Duke Caboom, a meta-level form of stunt casting that serves to further highlight that people have been unfairly sleeping on this guy and he’s still collecting on that interest.

Toy Story as a series serves as one of the greatest examples of Pixar’s proxy storytelling, going from a relatively simple story about toys when their owners aren’t looking into a glorious examination of theology and philosophy with only a mild shift in perception. Through the use of sentient toys, this series so far has covered religious idealism, zealotry, atheism, maltheism and the kind of existential dread that only the likes of Black Mirror have been able to match in the popular consciousness.

This film serves as the next rung on that thematic ladder, and it all starts with Forky. Forky is a toy, not store-bought like all the others but literally created by a child. Given life by a child. The details to this are intentionally kept vague, but when examined through that proxy (essentially, what would this be like if it were told with humans rather than toys?), it’s kind of… horrifying. It’s like Frankenstein crossed with an extended look at what it must have been like for the toys in Sid’s room back in the first film, resulting in an incredible amount of mindfrag material in just how weird the situation is. All of a sudden, Slappy’s discount cousins make a lot more sense, given the once-removed body horror that’s sewn into the story.

And yet that isn’t the weirdest thing; that comes with the introduction of Gabby Gabby and her motivation in the narrative, particularly as it pertains to Woody. It builds on one of the more innocuous aspects of the franchise’s aesthetic (some of the toys having voice boxes in addition to their own sentience) and, through a few moments from Woody as well as Buzz, gives it an unexpected spirituality. It’s described in-film as being one’s ‘inner voice’, their conscience or possibly even their soul. So when another toy comes around and says that it wants to take that from them… again, that proxy makes things a lot scarier than they seem on the surface.

This is where Woody’s character arc really kicks in, and ends up serving as a conclusion to everything that has happened to him over the course of these films. I described him earlier as a religious zealot, and that’s how his character has always been: His owner, the child who plays with him, is the most important thing in his life. His existence is predicated on serving that child, until the time comes for them to move on and he goes on to the next child.

Here, however, that stance turns into a perplexing form of altruism, as his interactions with Gabby are written with awareness of the terror involved in-universe while still pushing back against it. The end result of which is Woody making a decision that highlights how, even though his kid’s happiness is paramount, ensuring that he isn’t the only one to deliver that happiness is just as important. No toy gets left behind, even those who never had a starting point in the first place.

Even with my hesitance regarding the follow-up to one of my all-time favourite films, this manages to do pretty damn well and explore new avenues for what remains one of the stealthiest family film franchises still in circulation. I’d hesitate to call it the new best for the series, even with the leaps in animation fidelity from last time, but I’m far less hesitant to call it the weirdest entry in the series so far.